Without a Change of Political System, China’s Economy Will Always Be Second Class

A man riding a bicycle with a barrel of cooking oil leaves a supermarket in Beijing on June 12, 2024. Wang Zhao/AFP via Getty Images

Commentary

Recent news stories have highlighted communist China’s economic troubles with some predicting “economic oblivion.”

Most attention has focused on the what and how of China’s economic problems. However, the more important question is why this economic catastrophe is looming.

The answer is totalitarian governance, and its defective view of the world and human nature.

Chinese civilisation gave the world great literature and philosophy, and innovations such as the wheel, compass, paper money, printing press, and gunpowder.

But since the Maoist revolution, communist China has created very little, unless one counts innovations in re-education camps, oppression, and population control.

The disaster of communist China’s economy is even clearer if we compare it to Taiwan, one of the world’s richest countries.

Taiwan has fostered creativity and innovation, and thrives on research and development. It has created an acclaimed computer chip industry that is so important that if Taiwan were to be invaded, the world’s computing would be in peril.

Communist China, though, does not foster original research and creativity. Instead, it relies on copying the work of others.

Innovation Lost

While copying smart phone and solar panel technology may have worked, the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) repression of original research has resulted in making “cutting edge science” impossible in China.

The net result is that, despite Deng Xiaoping’s promise to advance the economy through “socialism with Chinese characteristics,” the Chinese economy has continued to fail—propped up by unsustainable borrowings and a construction-fuelled economy that has created numerous ghost cities.

What Deng and his successors have not understood is that socialism itself has caused China’s economic woes (and that socialism is incompatible with authentic Chinese values).

Prosperous economies rely on innovation and original solutions. Communism emphasises collective thought and state control, which prioritise compliance over creativity.

This should have been clear in communist China’s response to COVID-19.

When it broke out, local creative solutions to the outbreak were stifled out of deference to central authorities in Beijing. To put the point in other terms, communism fosters dependence on the state. This does not only mean economic dependence, but it also means intellectual dependence on the state.

This stifles individual intellectual activity and suppresses creative thinking of the sort that can create a prosperous free economy or can fight an unprecedented pandemic.

In the fight against COVID-19, the best that communist China could do was to produce a vaccine that was much more expensive and less effective than its Western rivals.

Compared to the Best

Communism also suffers from a fixation on technologies and material solutions.

There are always five-year plans and technical solutions to every problem—even if those solutions contradict other plans (such as the catastrophic one-child policy).

With its harsh materialism, communism is blinkered by considering only the “hardware” of an economy while ignoring the cultural “software” upon which successful economies are founded.

That point is clear if we consider the most prosperous economy of the modern world, which did not begin with a five-year plan or a set of technical goals.

Instead, it began with a philosophy of the human person and a set of propositions about the nature of humanity—most importantly that we are equal and endowed with certain rights by our Creator.

The prosperity of the United States has not relied on its natural resources, its location, or any other material factor.

Instead, that prosperity flowed naturally from its philosophy of the human person, its affirmation of human rights, its promotion of individual liberties, freedom of speech, and freedom of thought.

In other words, the genius that made the United States great is that prosperity does not come from material resources or technical solutions, but it rests on moral foundations and the freedom of the human person.

What drives our culture, and the success of our economy, is neither control over the human person nor centralised authority.

Instead, we thrive and prosper because of liberty, personal responsibility, independence and freedom of thought, and affirmation of human dignity and individual rights. Without these things, we are left with no innovation, no growth, just copying, intellectual piracy, and stagnation.

In short, freedom and open minds create strong economies and prosperity.

Communism and repressed minds breed poverty and economic collapse.

The sooner China’s leaders realise that fact, the better.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.